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i need help putting together my tangerine's enclosure. what should be in there? he is about 2-3 ft long and is a 10 gal. tank right now, soon i will put him in a 20l tank. would he ike a bigger water bowl? more climbing space? more hiding space? any pics of enclosures? as of rightnow i have a rock house and a water bowl with aspen shavings. thanks for any help

(i need help putting together my tangerine's enclosure. what should be in there? he is about 2-3 ft long and is a 10 gal. tank right now, soon i will put him in a 20l tank. would he ike a bigger water bowl? more climbing space? more hiding space? any pics of enclosures? as of rightnow i have a rock house and a water bowl with aspen shavings. thanks for any help)

HI! I have a tangerine honduran also. "Zorro" was hatchted last year in July. He is 10 months old now and about 16-20 inches long. (That's a guess since he's hard to measure being all squirmy). I have mine in a 20 gallon long tank. I had him in a 10 gallon when he was little and he seemed so restless. So I moved him into a 20 soon after I bought him in September of last year. I have an under the tank heater. In side I use reptile bark and he has several hides and 2 water bowls. I put 2 water bowls in there since the natural rock one doesn't last long. The other one is actually a dog/cat dish that he can get under. He likes that.
I also have those rock looking hides. One on the warm side and one in the middle of the tank. One is big and the other is smaller. He also had a paper towel roll and a first aid box that I cut down to make a hide box out of. He loves that. Also have a couple of fake plants. Thats about it. Mine hides all the time so I don't have anything in there for him to climb on. And I suppose when he gets bigger I'll take some of the smaller hides out.
How is yours with handling? Zorro was very squirmy at first but has calmed down some. I try to handle him often. He is eating 2-3 fuzzies a week.

A 20 long is a good size until or if it becomes a fairly large adult. I would suggest a under the tank heater on one side adjusted with some type of reostat to about 83-84 degrees with the other side room temp around the mid 70s. Newspaper or aspen bedding are your best choices for substrate but others will work OK. It's best to have a hide on the warm and cool side. Make sure to increase the size of the water bowl as it grows so that it always has plenty of room in it to fully submerge itself, which they like to do. If using a screen top I would use something like newspaper and cover most of the top except about 3 inches on each end of the top for circulation. If not it will most likely cause the humidity to be very low and could cause shedding problems for your honduran. Hope this helps and feel free to e-mail me if you have any more questions. Later, Randy Whittington